Polar codes have been proven to achieve the symmetric capacity of memoryless channel.Compared Bamboo with a successive cancellation list decoder, list-Fast simplified-successive cancellation generates more candidate paths, which leads to more resource costs and higher decoding latency.To remedy this drawback, we present a simplified sorting architecture.An M*L ordered candidate path matrix is constructed by preliminary sorter, where M and L denote the number of candidate path expanded by one constituent code and the list size of the decoder, respectively.Then, we eliminate the candidate paths that are definitely not in the L best paths by the proposed lossless pruning algorithm.
Finally, a compatible sorting network combining the advantages of bitonic sorter and odd-even sorter is proposed.Numerical results show that for L = 32 and M = 8, the proposed architecture can reduce 66.7% GLUCOMANNAN of candidate paths and save 52.3% of compare and swap units (CASUs) and 25% of CASU stages compared with the odd-even sorter.